It’s been barely a day and a half since The Great Reddit Blackout of 20231 began and I find myself with both the time and the inclination to write something about it. If you had asked me a month ago about the idea of moving away from Reddit I would have told you it would probably be a good idea but not going to happen. It’s simply too useful, too much knowledge, too much community, too many cute cat pictures.2 But time happens, people say things, and ideas change.
And so with this in mind I began preparing for my own time away from Reddit, not knowing how long it would be. I archived some threads I kept bookmarked for reference, copied down a list of my subscribed subreddits, classified them, and started looking for alternatives. I’m fortunate, paid enough that I can throw a few $ at an app I might only use for a couple of days, so I got myself a copy of Reeder 53, started collecting RSS feeds to fill the rolls of the “important” subs, and removed Apollo from my iPhone home screen. Still missing some things but I’ve got a start
Then came Monday, the first day of the blackout. Monday was weird. All day long, I kept opening a tab and starting to type “reddit.com/r” before canceling. I kept flipping over my phone and reaching for where Apollo lived just a day before. Each time I would stop, take a breath, then open up Reeder and look through what had been posted in my feeds. I had tried to collect a few things to fill the different niches. Some place posted rarely. Once a day, once a week, some even less than once a month. But I had a backlog of their old posts. Engadget and Tech Crunch got removed pretty quickly. When you have to specifically click on each item to make it go away instead of just waiting for it to fall off the page you get tired of feeds when you just get a wall of uninteresting posts.
Today however things have been different. There were a handful of things when I woke up and a few more through the day but now my feeds are empty minus the few things I marked to come back to later. It took much less of my time than Reddit ever did and I read every one of the items that came up. Not all of them completely, I did become uninterested in a few things here and there. I still have some gaps I need to fill, subjects I don’t have replacements for, and the more interactive places I spent time haven’t been filled but not once
Not.
Once.
Did I start typing “reddit” into my browser.
I don’t think I’m going back…
- I like to be dramatic sometimes, sue me.
- Apparently I was subscribed to no less than 22 subreddits devoted to pictures of cute animals.
- https://reederapp.com/ I actually had to buy both the desktop and mobile versions.